I’m the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Imagine Easy Solutions. Our products are used by over 70 million people yearly. Our flagship product, EasyBib.com, is a popular research management and writing tool. Our newest product, GetCourse, allows marketers and trainers to add questions and user tracking to any presentation or document.

My friend and I have been bootstrapping our company since 2001, when we started our first product EasyBib as high school students. I graduated from Northwestern in 2006, and worked as an investment banker at Lehman Brothers until early 2008 (before their demise). At that point, I started working on Imagine Easy full time building and acquiring educational and media products. Today we have a team of over 50 and offices in New York City and Berlin. We were listed as one of Inc Magazine’s fastest growing private companies in 2013.

Don't Dis Doodling: It's Made Our Meetings Way More Productive

Why did someone draw an eyeball on the whiteboard? This was supposed to be a marketing meeting, but instead of distributing a meeting agenda, the newest addition to our GetCourse team, Ross, was drawing pictures.

The purpose of the meeting was to recap progress positioning GetCourse as a presentation tracking and lead capture tool for content marketers. Pointing to the eyeball drawn on the whiteboard, Ross explained that “we had 724 more visits to the blog compared to the previous week.” Instead of distributing a handout with the meeting structure, Ross portrayed the order of business in pictures.

The bullseye represented the goals we were setting; a stick figure below it indicated that we’d talk about people to contact; a play button depicted by a simple circled triangle suggested a discussion of video strategy. Ross drew during the meeting, not simply jotting down key ideas from around the table but illustrating them in quirky—and sometimes funny—drawings.

I was caught off guard at first (was he “good quirky” or too off-the-wall?) but Ross has continued to run meetings this way and it’s caught on. Many of our meetings have started using visual agendas and we now encourage our teams to doodle on the whiteboard. Kind of like viewing an infographic, visualizing the meeting agenda lets participants see the entire story from a bird’s eye view and elevates the conversation. When you distribute a printed agenda, everyone looks down at his or her paper, but posting images on a whiteboard forces everyone to look together and facilitates a better group discussion. Ross’ color-coding of ideas and results also helps us to better understand the connections between them.

The results have been positive and far-reaching: The whole team immediately started engaging more actively in discussions. Before, among a group of six people, three might chat actively about a given topic; with the new format, five or six chime in. That’s a huge improvement in engagement. Our idea generation also doubled: We used to come up with an average of three ideas and takeaways per topic, and now we’re producing six. Meanwhile, the meeting duration has reduced by about eight minutes on average. It’s always a good sign when you start producing more ideas in less time!

These positive changes make sense: 65 percent of the population are visual learners and there’s evidence that we retain information as much as six times more effectively when it’s presented through a mixture of speech and visuals rather than speech alone.

Based on what I’ve learned, here’s how to do it well:

Advance planning: There’s a big difference between thinking about the most effective ways to communicate a topic and drawing shapes on the fly. Our meeting leader spends 20 minutes before each meeting drawing out the visual agenda in a thoughtful way.

Note-taking: If you take a photo of the whiteboard at the end of a meeting, you might not remember what the symbols mean. We have an intern record detailed minutes during the meeting so the whiteboard can foster discussion without worrying about documentation. Afterward, we cull through the notes and send a follow-up email with key takeaways.

Variety: Visuals are intended to steer people’s attention, so think about color contrasts, circling key words and structure. For example, our new product GetCourse has a target market split between HR and marketing professionals, so Ross drew a matrix for the two verticals. That enabled us to write our thoughts around each and visually notice the differences and overlap.

Dynamic creation: Don’t be afraid to keep adding. When we were talking about events our team could attend, we wrote “14” over the depiction because that’s how many leads we’ve generated by attending events. This let us visualize the live updates together and see that, wow, we really have had success through this tactic.

Keep it simple: Think of this as your inner doodle. If you draw something too complicated, it may place too much focus on one aspect or absorb too much time and bottleneck the conversation.

Pretend it’s a blog post: A good blog post has intelligent spacing. Here, too, think about headings and subheadings. The same way that subheadings are a uniform font and color in a blog post, think about visual consistency on your whiteboard.

You should also consider that:

Anyone can draw: This is something even you can do. The images just need to be simple and clear. For instance, draw stick figures and show growth with up arrows.

Drawing saves time over designing a presentation: You won’t have to spend time finding suitable images, and doing cumbersome activities like resizing a font. With drawing, you can create and erase content in seconds.

Not only does this new approach make our meetings more productive, it gives us a license to doodle in public. I call that a win-win.

I’d love to hear if you’ve had similar success with drawings during meetings. If you leave any comments below or tweet me at @tapneal, I’ll be sure to respond!

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